Re: (Newbie) How to turn AutoFill-mode on/off

[ken]

Alan,

You bring up a good point.  Adding, deleting, editing, and renumbering
footnotes is not at all something which should be done when you're
trying to put your thoughts "on paper" (Wow!  Archaic in a fraction of a
lifetime).  While composing the manuscript, you don't want to deal with
the trivialities of footnotes.  First and foremost is the writing.  
Until the text of the manuscript is completed, footnotes would be a
distraction.

The method I use when composing is to leave the reference in the body of
the text, e.g.:

... and that, according to Heidegger, "every metaphysical thought is
ontological or it is nothing at all."<fn>(Holzwege, p. 206)</fn>

The invented tags <fn>...</fn> mark off a simplified note but one which
is sufficient when composing the document and which make a search or
search-and-replace easy.  After the composing and proofreading and
rewriting is finished, then begins the task of visual formatting, 
including creating the footnotes or-- what I prefer-- endnotes.  This is 
the way I would go regardless of which text formatter was adopted.

If I didn't already have so many projects on my agenda, I'd consider 
elisp code which would pull out the "<fn>...</fn>" tags, grab the 
corresponding full citation from another, bibliographic file, and create 
from these footnotes and/or endnotes for an html doc.

Just my $0.02,
ken

-- 
AMD crashes?  See http://cleveland.lug.net/~ken/amd-problem/.

Alan Shutko at 02:07 (UTC-0000) on Sun, 24 Nov 2002 said:

= ken <ken@cleveland.lug.net> writes:
= 
= > If the kind of document your writing is no more typographially complex
= > than, say, a master's thesis, then I would suggest using HTML.  It'll do
= > superscripts and subscripts (e.g., for footnotes), italics, bold,
= > various and variable-sized fonts, tables, and a lot more and quite a bit
= > more easily than LaTeX.
= 
= If you're doing anything with footnotes, or anything you want to
= number, you do not want to be writing superscripts and subscripts by
= hand.  Or section or figure numbers, etc.  Unless you happen to like
= renumbering everything when you change something.
= 
= You'd end up doing it with a word processor which would autogenerate
= all that and output HTML.
= 
= For that kind of thing, it would be about as easy to learn LaTeX, and
= you'd spend a whole lot less time doing things manually.
= 
=